Minorities It implies that there is a more

Minorities It implies that there is a more or less homogeneous majority society in which smaller distinct groups are either rejected, tolerated or integrated

Cultural diversity A society characterized by diversity recognizes that it is composed by individuals with different cultural backgrounds. They negotiate on equal terms the factors which they have in common and which bind them into a community

MULTICULTURALISM: definition (1) Different people from different cultures coexist but do not co-operate or interact. They may be aware of one another through different dress, religious observances, cuisine, etc. , but they do not attempt to understand or relate to one another on a deeper level.

Multiculturalism: definition (2) M. refers to a state of communal diversity inside the territory of a state when people of various races, ethnicities, religious and cultural backgrounds live, work and trade together, participate in political life and are engaged in social and cultural interactions with the society while the society remains aware and fully accepts the different backgrounds of all its members. In this sense it is contrasted to the concept of a nation-state or assimilated state (homogeneous) where the inhabitants naturally share or are assimilated into sharing racial, cultural and religious backgrounds.

Multiculturalism It thus describes both - the demographic make-up of a country’s population as an expression of the ideal of cross-cultural inter-ethnic harmony - and the public political initiatives that promote such an ideal.

Policy of Multiculturalism • The policy of Multiculturalism (cultural mosaic) was first passed in Canada in 1972 by the Trudeau Government in order to allow everyone to retain his/her distinct culture while adapting to living and working in the new country. • Canada together with Australia embraced the ideology of multiculturalism whereas the USA still preferred the melting pot policy of assimilation

Assimilation People give up their own cultural and linguistic identity and try to be as like members of their host society as possible

Critics of the multicultural model “In our schools , multiculturalism means little more than teaching the kids a few bongo rhythms, how to tie a sari and so forth. In the police training programme, it means telling cadets that black people are so ‘culturally different’ that they can’t help making trouble. Multiculturalism is the latest token gesture towards Britain’s blacks, and it ought to be exposed, like ‘integration’ and ‘racial harmony’, for the sham of it” (S. Rushdie, 1991)

Problems connected with multiculturalism and its policies • A multicultural society lacks the cohesion to form a true community and could degenerate into parallel society • This affects social trust, erodes the host nation’s distinct culture and the sense of belonging with a consequent retreat in individualism. People less willing to co-operate with each other or make sacrifices on behalf of a community they no longer identify with. Thus in such a society no generally accepted basis on which shared ideals and values rest.

Monoculturalism • Recently right-of-center governments in several European states have returned to an official monoculturalism (see Cameron’s speech)

Renegotiation of the idea of culture • No fictional purity but cultural diversity • Nothing is ever completely “other” (foreign and unknown) • World culture is not uniform but can be described as “organized diversity”, web of various local cultures (not necessarily anchored to a geographic territory), “glocalities”. • Culture should become more flexible and serve the interests of all members of the community

Cultural diversity • It involves interaction on a cross-cultural or inter-cultural basis (alternative to multiculturalism) • It implies a potential common ground on which individuals can meet and interact.

Interculturalism It implies the existence of a network of horizontal relationships characterized by a dialogical and communicative afflatus which are the results of the coexistence of a plurality of cultures within one community.

Interculturalism • In an intercultural context, cultures enter into dialogue confronting their differences. • The other is not simply observed and described but enter into a dynamic relationship in the full respect of his/her difference • In a pluralistic society equality and difference are strictly connected and unavoidable: everyone has the right to preserve one’s own culture which is to be recognized with equal rights and dignity

B. Parekh, Rethinking multiculturalism (2000) Parekh argues that the emphasis on homogeneity in Western thought needs to be replaced by a broad-based humanism which recognizes cultural difference

Multiculturalism, interculturalism, transculturalism • Melting pot (USA): metaphor that impies that all the immigrant cultures are mixed and amalgamated in order to be assimilated into American society (e pluribus unum). After its crisis in the 60’s the ideology of multiculturalism began to develop. • Multiculturalism: coexistence of several distinct cultures within the same community, no assimilation • Interculturalism: presence of relationships and exchanges between and within those cultures. Coexistence is extended to acceptance, comprehension and exchange. • Transculturalism: overcoming of the traditional concept of culture as fixed. Idea of culture as always in process, costant transformation. Dialectical nature of cultural influences, no cultural barriers. It implies the reinventing of a common shared culture.

Policies of multiculturalism and interculturalism Effective in the fight against discrimination, in rejecting ethnocentrism, and in encouraging an ethic of recognition and respect of diversity.

However… • These models are based on a traditional concept of culture characterized by social homogeneity, they insist on difference and maintain polarity. • Transculturalism, on the contrary, goes beyond by contesting cultural barriers and interrogating the notion of culture as exclusive, fixed and rooted in one single tradition

Transculturalism Term coined by the Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz in 1940 indicating a transaction of a culture with another (concept based on José Marti’s thinking that all American people were biologically and culturally métis and therefore part of a dialectic with the other). T. as reinventing of a common culture based on the meeting and the intermingling of different peoples and cultures. T. can be envisaged as a new form of humanism based on the relinquishing of strong and fixed traditional identities and past heritages in favour of the breaking down of boundaries and a recognition of a culture of métissage. One’s identity is thus not onedimensional but defined and recognized in relation to the other, not singular but multiple

Diversity and Identity • Who am I? • Who are they? • Who are we?

Imagining a new world • Imagination and negotiation are essential for people to decide what they have in common and make them a community.

The role of literature and art The writer can portray a vision of “a single culture with very different facets” “And if it is a dream, that is the artist’s job: to extent the reach of our imagination about the potential of real life and to dream our dream about how things could be if we had the will” (Mike Phillips, 2004)

True cross-cultural interaction Cross-cultural interaction involves adaptation and compromise on both sides and ends in an agreement about what values all the members of society might share

Caryl Phillips, Color me English (2011) «I believe passionately in the moral capacity of fiction to wrench us out of our ideological burrows and force us to engage with a world that is clumsily transforming itself, a world that is peopled with individuals we might otherwise never meet in our daily lives. As long as we have literature as a bulwark against intolerance, and as a force for change, then we have a chance» .

Black people in Britain: an historical survey • • • The history of Black people in Britain used to be dated with the arrival of the SS Empire Windrush in June 1948 (steam ship with 492 Caribbean immigrants, recruited to rebuild the war-torn economy and join the English workers, expecially on London transport) Welcomed with official enthusiasm, with the tacit expectations that they would be «guest workers» who would eventually return home As a matter of fact they determined irreversible transformations of British society: it soon became clear that the immigrants had gone there to stay and make their new home in Britain. BUT Black presence in Britain goes back considerably longer and includes a wider spectrum than the Windrush generation. Middle of the eighteeen century: British involvement in the slave trade (growing number of Africans and Indians as servants in English households) Significant increase in black population. By 1770 this population is estimated to have numbered around 15, 000 people, based largely in London and around ports involved in transatlantic trade such as Bristol and Liverpool.

the slave trade

Diagram of an African slave ship, printed in Thomas Clarkson, The History of the Rise, Progress, and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the Slave-Trade by the British Parliament, Vol. 2, London, 1808.

William Hogarth and his paintings (second half XVIII century) • Images of black servants can be found in paintings and on prints, textiles and ceramics of the period and provide rare visual evidence of the black British presence. The servant is often depicted as a marginal and isolated figure who is included merely to reflect the wealth and fashionable tastes of his 'owner'. • Black Britons worked in a variety of professions; as sailors, shopkeepers, artisans, labourers, peddlers and street musicians, amongst others. The biggest employment sector for both white and black populations was domestic service and a large number of black people worked as servants, butlers, valets and other domestic helps. Unlike their white counterparts, black domestic workers were largely unpaid and unable to voluntarily leave their employer.

The artist William Hogarth (1697 -1764) often included black subjects in his satirical images of 18 th-century life. It has been suggested that the figure of the servant reflects Hogarth's beliefs about the 'destabilising' influence of transatlantic trade. The presence of the servant, the monkey and the mahogany table of tea things all suggest a colonial source for the merchant's wealth. Look at he dehumanising silver 'slave collar' that the servant wears

Joseph Johnson as portrayed in Vagabondiana (1817)

The Empire Windrush

Immigration from colonial possessions after the II World War • Windrush generation (Jamaican, Guyanese, Trinidadian migrants): start of large-scale postwar migration • During World War II West Indian soldiers in the British Army • They considered their migration to Britain a «return to the Mother Country» • After the war Britain was in need of workers, the Nationality Act facilitated immigration. Britain actively recruited labour in the West Indies for the National Health Service, London Transport, and factories in the North. • Very soon xenophobic responses and rescrictive immigration laws, immigration nearly impossible for black Commonwealth citizens (see «chronology» in the handouts).

Black British • • • The term came up in the later 1960 s, in conjunction with black power movements, and gained wider currrency in the ‘ 70 s: it became an ombrella term for the entire spectrum of non-white British citizens and their communities, all living under difficult conditions in a white-dominated society, as «second class citizens» (Buchi Emecheta 1976) The term was deployed by the Caribbean Artists Movement in the late 1960 s. The movement bridged the transformation of Britain’s West Indian community from one of exiles and immigrants toblack British. At its inception it was used to refer to distinct groups of West Indian migrants. Later it was used to include migrant groups from other parts of the worl and to speak about people with African, Caribbean and Asian backgrounds (expecially South Asian, i. e. Indians and Pakistanis), sometimes including also East Asians e. g. Chinese. The term is not simply a marker of ethnic identity and/or cultural belonging. It refers to people of many different ethnicities and diverse cultures labelled «Black» for their social and political condition of marginalization and oppression. Marker of their contingent placing outside the social mainstream. Common experience of racism and marginalization (S. Hall, 1988) The term became very current in the 1980 s and ‘ 90 s, but it was questioned and criticized for its broad, inclusive usage. Some critics have stressed the need to acknowledge cultural specificities and avoid too general terms which tend to homogenize the field. Beginning with the third millennium and the emphasis on cultural diversity, the usefulness of «black British» as a political term is waning

Black British literature • Black British literature is produced by immigrants or their descendants who have become part of the country’s social fabric (first and following generations). • Fundamental challenge to any general traditional understanding of what is «British» • It raises crucial questions about cultural identities and the concept of «national» and «nationhood» (various, shifting elements contribute to its making).

Black British Literature: first expressions and its development • Literary tradition which developed after the II World War (pioneer figures like S. Selvon and G. Lamming) • But body of texts pre-date post-war works, earlier generations of black writers in Britain. They published their works in the later eighteen century in the context of abolition campaigns and mainly in the form of life writing (the pioneer is O. Equiano with his autobiography Interesting Narratives, 1789)

Black British literature • Body of texts marked by a degree of heterogeneity that almost resists definition • Texts by writers with African, South-Asian, Indo-Caribbean and African Caribbean backgrounds. Writers who belong to different generations and social classes, located in different geographical regions of Britain • Different genres, texts written in different varieties of English • Space not homogeneous, heterogeneity is one of its defining features

A «Black British» literature? • D. Dabydeen, 1987: «Black British literature refers to that created and published in Britain, largely for a British audience, by black writers either born in Britain or who have spent a major portion of their lives in Britain» . • «But what of the term ‘black’? Does black denote colour of skin or quality of mind? If the former, what does skin colour have to do with the act of literary creation? If the latter, what is ‘black’ about black? What are the aesthetic structures that differentiate that expression from ‘white’ expression? » • Though problematic the term is provocative and challenging. It implies the necessity of redifying and redressing the concepts of both Britishness and blackness, of reshaping space and identities.

The label «black British literature» : reductive and divisive? • The label became current in the 1970 s, designed to describe writing by authors based in Britain but with origins in former British colonies in Africa, Asia and the Caribbean. • Wide currency since the 1980 s • Many writers reject it: it suggests a marginalization, as if BB Lit were an appendage to mainstream literature. • At the time it was a political label rather than a purely racial label: common experience of migration, alienation and discrimination combined with an «subversive» assertion of attachment to Britain. • Now the label has lost some of its early scope and conventionally refers to authors of African and Caribbean descent • Writers with Asian roots are today subsumed under the «British Asian or Asian British» banner. Growing gap between communities which were once bound by a shared status as racial and cultural outsiders, now increasingly divided often along religious lines (in particular after 9/11 and 7/7)

Labels are problematic! • The question of categorization is always a political one: political implications of acts of inclusion and exclusion. • The act of grouping texts conditions the significance and the meaning the texts attain in any given reading.

Black British literature: thematic and formal characteristics • Tradition of writing which promotes complexity and heterogeneity, alert to the politics of culture, race and gender • The sense of exclusion and marginalization experienced by these writers has not given rise to a literature of victimization and retaliation • The novelty is not just thematic but also formal: linguistic and structural inventiveness (starting with Selvon’s novel) • Disruption of tradition which goes beyond vocabulary and grammar. It concerns the shape of narrative itself. • The text transgresses conventions • Fragmented narrative which expresses the discontinuity and ambiguity at the heart of the «black British» condition

Theresa May • • • Theresa May became the new leader of the Conservative Party, and the new prime minister of the United Kingdom, on July 13, 2016. She replaced the resigning David Cameron, who had been prime minister since 2010. She became Home Secretary under new Prime Minister David Cameron in 2010. She served in that role for six years until 2016, when the UK political world was rocked by ‘Brexit, ’ the vote by Britons to leave the European Union. Cameron immediately announced that he would resign; after two weeks of maneuvering, May was chosen by her Conservative Party colleagues to succeed him. As Prime Minister she unexpectedly called for a snap election to be held in June of 2017, expecting that a Conservative victory would strengthen her hand in Brexit negotiations with Europe. Instead (and also unexpectedly), her party lost seats to Labour, leading to a hung parliament. Her next 18 months were consumed with Brexit negotiations, which ended in a crushing 432 -202 vote against her Brexit plan on January 15, 2019.

Brexit as a Backlash against ‘Loss of Privilege’ and Multiculturalism • • Centrality of concerns about migration and multiculturalism in the debates on Brexit Multiculturalism seeks to move minoritized groups from being seen as subjects of assimilation and domination to actors who can make transformative claims not just about themselves but also on the whole of the national and civic identity. Hence it determines a loss of privilege for certain groups. Datas show that support for Brexit did not come from the poor exclusively. White, middle-class, older English voters who own their house and pick up a nice pension voted for Brexit. Voted for Brexit: 81% of people who thought that multiculturalism is a force for ill and 80 % of those who saw immigration as a social ill.

Race This is a controversial term, which comes from historical attempts to categorise people according to their skin colour and physical characteristics. The word has no scientific basis for divisions into biologically determined groups. Individuals, not “races”, are the main sources of human variation. It is, however, in everyday use and is enshrined in legislation in the Race Relations Acts. The word “race” is used with quotation marks by some authors as an acknowledgement that it is a controversial and contested term.

Diaspora • • • It literally means «scattering» , «dispersal» , traditionally used with reference to Jewish history (experience of living outside the Holy land, in foreign countries, in hostile host societies, under forms of oppression) Situation of displacement, of people forced to leave their homes, trying to cope under adverse circumstances Forced dispersion is caused by «push factors like famine, war, enslavement, ethnic cleansing, political oppression» (Gilroy, 1997) The history of colonialism, with centuries of slavery, violent dislocation, enforced migration, genocides, has engendered different forms of diaspora These diasporic movements have shaken up traditional forms and structures of belonging determining «in-between» positions and identities In order to counter their condition of displacement people cultivate a feeling of togetherness by means of a shared cultural memory. The missing homeland can be culturally compensated for and people find a basis of belonging (crucial role of literature) Nowadays when we talk about a diasporic people we refer basically to the community formed in the host country as a result of the phenomenon of dispersal and forced or volontary migration «Imaginary homelands» (Rushdie, 1991)

What is a ‘diaspora’? Diasporas are communities of people living together in one country who ‘acknowledge that ‘the old country’ – a notion often buried deep in language, religion, custom or folklore – always has some claim on their loyalty and emotions’’ […] Robin Cohen, Global Diasporas: An Introduction, 1997

What is a ‘diaspora’? […] ‘a member’s adherence to a disporic community is demonstrated by an acceptance of an inescapable link with their past migration history and a sense of coethnicity with others of a similar background’ Robin Cohen, Global Diasporas: An Introduction, 1997

Living «in-between» entails a critique of • ethnic, racial monolithic assumptions and prejudices • cultural nationalism • all forms of absolutism

II generation of migrants • They were born in Britain or arrived as young persons • Their attachment to Britain is symbolized by their British passport • Their birthplace is Britain, or their youth is spent there, British culture is of primary importance in their formative years • The homelands left behind by their parents are less «available» to them, they have no direct memories (just in some cases of their journeys to those countries) • Their parents’ homeland may be present through the parents’memories and accounts • The connections with the parents’ origins are tenuous • But their attachment and belonging to Britain is problematic

New ethnicities and the overcoming of the «burden of representation» • New diasporic subjects, British born/bred, abandon defensive positions and the celebration of the purity of culture and the essentialist view of their ethnicities (the «burden of representation» of the previous generation) • They confront and narrate in a realistic way the complexity of ethnic relations in contemporary Britain • S. Hall appreciates in particular H. Kureishi’s work for his refusal «to represent the Black experience in Britain as monolithic, self-contained, sexually stabilized, in a word always and only positive»

Rushdie and the «hybrid» novel «Those who oppose the novel most vociferously today are of the opinion that intermingling with a different culture will inevitably weaken and ruin their own. I am of the opposite opinion. The Satanic Verses celebrate hybridity, impurity, intermingling, the transformation that comes of new and unexpected combinations of human beings, cultures, ideas, politics, movies, songs. It rejoices its mongrelization and fears the absolutism of the Pure. […] a bit of this, a bit of that, that is how newness enters the world. It is the great opportunity that mass migration gives the world, and I have tried to embrace it. The Satanic verses […] is a love song to our mongrel selves» (Rushdie 1991)

Post-ethnic and post-racial • Concepts introduced in the 90 s referring to a society in which «the assumption that people are deeply obligated in the nature of things to make common cause with others of the same skin color, morphological traits and kinship system «(D. Hollinger, 2011), collapses. • Diasporic subjects are free to choose their own belonging, independently from their ethnic and racial belonging. • Traditional ethnic and racial categories are abandoned • Writers claim their own independence as subjects free to determine themselves, no longer obliged to be the spokesmen of a specific community.

Chambers, «Out of tradition and into History» • «No single tradition can function as a guarantee of the present, can save us. There are many traditions, constituted by gender, ethnicity, sexuality, race, class, that criss-cross the patterns of our lives. By bringing them into history, into recognition and representation, we appreciate the complexity that challenges the tiranny on the present of a single, official heritage: that of ‘being British’. At this point, tradition, historical memory, ‘roots’, become important less for themselves, as though tokens of a vanished ‘authenticity’, and more as suggestive, active signs, stimulating a personal and collective confidence in assembling effective passages through the possibilities of the present»

Salman Rushdie

Rushdie, ‘a migrant storyteller’ • • • «Certainly, writing on the East and living in the West engenders friction. But the problem of uprooting is even more important. My family originates in Kashmir, now my family lives in Pakistan and myself in London. The series of uprootings has made me feel split between several worlds» . (Interview, 1984) «Rushdie has never been accepted in any of his ‘homes’ In England he was considered very foreign and exotic; back in India he was ridiculed for his perfect British accent and considered brainwashed and corrupted by the materialiatic West; in Pakistan he is still considered an infidel and a blasphemer» (Loomba). «To migrate is to experience deep changes and wrenches in the soul, but the migrant is not simply transformed by this act, he also transforms the new world» (Rushdie) Migration entails deracination and great suffering, but it is alaso an emancipatory process: «To be born again, first you have to die» (opening words of The Satanic Verses). All his works celebrate hybridization and contaminations

Hybridity • In a plain sense, «hybrid» denotes the outcome of crossbreeding, as in gardening or in farming. • This kind of biological language was typical of XIX century discourse and of Darwinian arguments which connoted human races according to the racist view of «purity» and «misgenation» ( «half-breeds» etc. were considered inferior because impure) • Postcolonial use of «hybridity» both recall and redraw racist legacies (in use from the 80 s in this new connotation) • In a critical and cultural sense the term is employed to elude given structures of familiar oppositions and to describe processes that transgress traditional boundaries • Bhabha: strategic reversal of processes of domination through «disavowal»

Imaginary Homelands (1991) • In the first essay, “Imaginary Homelands”, he retraces the origins of his novel Midnight’s Children (1981) set in India and Pakistan. • He tries to recontruct his Bombay, but it is an «imaginary India, India of the mind» • Attempt to restore the world of his childhood home in Bombay. Impossible task to “return home” via the process of re-membering and writing because «the past can be recovered only in fragments» • Sense of displacement and alienation for the migrants who arrive in new places «with baggage (beliefs, values, traditions, customs, behaviours) which often exclude them from being recognized as part of the nation’s people» (J. Mc. Leod) • However, there is also something to be gained in such an experience: multiple, enriched perspective and sensibility.

Rushdie, Midnight’s Children • «The purpose of fiction was in a way paradoxical, that the fiction is telling the truth at a time at which the people who claimed to be telling the truth are making things up. So in a way you have politicians or the media, the people who form opinion, in fact making the fictions. And it becomes the duty of the writer of fiction to start telling the truth» (Rushdie, 1999) • The aim of the writer is that of «giving voice» , «to speak up for the great mass who never had the chance to sit down at a table, let alone to win, and this is clearly a literature of the highest importance and value» (Rushdie) • History/stories (History is never objective)

Hanif Kureishi The Buddha of Suburbia (1990)

H. Kureishi • Born in Britain in 1954 with a Pakistani father and English mother. • In his essay “The Rainbow Sign” (1986) he records his experience as a boy growing up in London, a visit to Pakistan as a young man and makes some comparisons between the two locations. • As a child he had no idea of what the subcontinent was like. At school he was mistakenly identified as an Indian by his teacher. Labelled as an outsider by his schoolmates despite the fact that he was British, he wasn’t permitted to belong. • When he goes to Karachi as an adut he finds it difficult to consider this place as “home”. • Identity crisis: “we are Pakistanis, but you, you will always be a Paki”, a relative tells him. • New models of identity, “in-between” positions.

i Caryl Phillips

Caryl Phillips The European Tribe (1987) A New World Order (2001)

C. Phillips, The European Tribe (1987) «Europe’s absence of self-awareness seems to me directly related to a lack of a cogent sense of history. It is no coincidence that at the great European schools of learning, history is still the most respected od degrees. But history is also the prison from which Europeans often speak. It is a false history, an unquestioning and totally selfish one, in which whites civilize and discover […]» «Europe is blinded by her past, and does not understand the high price of her churches, art galleries, and architecture. My presence in Europe is part of that price. I was raised in Europe, I am culturally of the West»

Monica Ali , Brick Lane (2003)

The “Other” “The concept of the Other signifies that which is unfamiliar and extraneous to a dominant subjectivity, the opposite or negative against which an authority is defined. The West thus conceived of its superiority relative to the perceived lack of power, self-consciousness, or ability to think and rule of colonized peoples” (Boehmer, 1995, Colonial and Postcolonial Literatures)

The Black Atlantic Ideal field of exploration and enquiry of the «New World Order» (C. Phillips, 2002)

History of migrations, diasporas, exiles generated new «translated» and hybridized cultures which call into question old systems of thought and values

Legacy in the present Black Atlantic: - old forms of slavery - new disquieting forms of subjegation and marginalization

It may appear that seas put nations out of all communion with each other. But this is not so; for by means of commerce, seas form the happiest natural provision for their intercourse […] And hence communications with such lands, especially where there are settlements upon them connected with the mother countries giving occasion for such communications, bring it about that evil and violence committed in one place of our globe are felt in all. Such possible abuse cannot, however, annul the right of a man as a citizen of the world to attempt to enter into communion with all others, and for this purpuse to visit all the regions of the earth. I. Kant, «Nature and Conditions of Cosmopolita Right» (1796)

The Black Atlantic “connects” Africa, the Americas and Europe Site of encounters, fluid space

"contact zones" social spaces where ‘disparate cultures meet, clash and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of dominance and subordination – like colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out across the globe today’ (M. L. Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, 1992)

The Black Atlantic (1993) PAUL GILROY

The Black Atlantic (1993) PAUL GILROY «Striving to be both European and black requires some specific forms of double consciousness. By saying this I do not mean to suggest that taking on either or both of these unfinished identities necessarily exhausts the subjective resources of any particular individual…

The Black Atlantic (1993) PAUL GILROY …However, where racist, nationalist, or ethnically absolutist discourses orchestrate political relationship so that these identities appear to be mutually exclusive, occupying the space between them or trying to demonstrate their continuity has been viewed as a provocative and even oppositional act of political insubordination» .

The Black Atlantic fosters a critical dialogue which awakens the conscience of an uninterrupted history of oppression which is the soil on which the great fortune and the advancement of Western societies are built.

Diasporic peoples struggle for different ways to be «British» It means «to be British and something else complexly related to Africa and the America, to shared histories of enslavement, racist subordination, cultural survival, hybridization, resistance and political rebellion» (James Clifford, Routes, 1997)

Role of literature for diasporic peoples • It participates in a healing process. • It partakes of the construction of memory and re-construction of identities

What is Black British literature? Contested definition • literature written in English by Caribbean, Asian, African and other people who originated from the ex-British Empire • over the years the preoccupation of much of the literature has been with the troubled quest for identity and freedom • Blackness redefines the concept of Britishness and of British literature

Zadie Smith White Teeth (2000)

Andrea Levy She was born 1958 in London to Jamaican parents. She grew up in London in a council estate. Her father came to England on the SS Empire Windrush and he was joined by her mother 6 months later. In Jamaica her parents were both educated members of the middle class and were considered “coloured” because they were light-skinned blacks. They expected to be privileged in England because of their colour and social class but they suffered discrimination.

Andrea Levy (from essays and interviews) • • • “I am English born and bred, as the saying gos (as far as I can remember, it is born and bred and not born-and-bred-with-very-long-line-of-whiteancestors-directly-descended-from-Anglo-Saxons). England is the only society I tryly know and sometime understand. I don’t look as the English did in the England of the 30’s or before, but being English is my birthright. England is my home. An eccentric place where sometimes I love being English”. “I was educated to be English. Alongside me – learning, watching, eating and playing – were white children. But those white children would never have to grow up to question whether they were English or not”. “So what am I? Where do we fit into Britain, 2000 and beyond? ” “If Englishness doesn’t define me, then I’ll define Englishness” “Englishness must never be allowed to attach itself to ethnicities” “Being Back and British is a dynamic thing. It’s always changing. What we are trying to do is rid ourselves of a racist society. I want equality”

Levy • • Committed writing, literature has a social function. Deconstruction of the official version of Englishness. Her dual cultural heritage positions herself in a hybrid location. Insecurity about her “home” and sense of belonging

Andrea Levy The Fruit of the Lemon (2007) The Long Song (2010)

Fruit of the Lemon • • • Published in 1999, the novel is partly autobiographical. Bildungsroman set in the 80’s. Faith is a Londoner of Jamaican origins (daughter of Black parents) Her dark skin and background are markers of her alterity. She grows up in London among white English students and friends, knowing nothing about her family (erasures and gaps in her family history), and constantly struggles to achieve a unified identity. She feels out of place. Identity crisis, she is forced to acknowledge her difference. II part of the novel: trip to Jamaica where she rediscovers and retrieves her roots (importance of the stories told by the various narrators, remembering the past as an essential step in the process of re-membering identities). She learns about a complex mixed-race ancestry which calls into question the myth of a pure identity. Faith’s re-birth: sense of pride in being black and awareness of her multiple, hybrid identity as a source of richness and empowerment. She reclaims her postion as the “bastard daughter of the Empire” She goes back to England with a new awareness.

STUART HALL (1) Jamaican-born British cultural theorist and academic (born 1932, Kingston, Jam. —died 2014, London Eng. ), was a pioneer in the field of cultural studies, an interdisciplinary approach to the role of social institutions in the shaping of culture and “the networks of meanings which individuals and groups use to make sense of and communicate with one another. ” Hall attained international stature in 1979 when he coined the term Thatcherism to describe the phenomenon of the broad (and ultimately long-lasting) political, economic, and cultural changes that would eventually be wrought by incoming prime minister Margaret Thatcher and her conservative supporters. He later chastidsed leftist thinkers and politicians for underestimating Thatcherism’s enduring popularity among disillusioned working-class people and for failing to counter the harshest elements of Thatcherism with a compelling alternative that would promote multiculturalism, environmentalism, and civil rights.

STUART HALL (2) Hall attended Jamaica College and in 1951 was awarded a Rhodes scholarship to study literature at Merton College, Oxford. He discovered that his dark skin and multiethnic, mixed-race heritage (including his childhood in Jamaica, where skin colour played such a central role in society that even his own parents did not allow him to associate with darker-skinned children) left him feeling out of place in England. He abandoned literature and began to develop a theory of “encoding/decoding” with which to analyze how those in power communicate with the masses through popular culture and how those on the receiving end interpret those messages. Hall was the founding editor (1960– 61) of the New Left Review and a research fellow (1964– 68), acting director (1968– 72), and director (1972– 79) at the University of Birmingham’s innovative Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. In 1979 he joined the sociology faculty at the Open University, from which he retired in 1998

STUART HALL (3) From the Independent, Obituary 2014 https: //www. independent. co. uk/news/obi tuaries/professor-stuart-hall-sociologistand-pioneer-in-the-field-of-culturalstudies-whose-work-explored 9120126. htm

STUART HALL (4) “The sociologist and cultural theorist Stuart Hall, who has died aged 82, was an intellectual giant and an inspirational figure in the field of sociology. He was one of the founders of what is now known as "British Cultural Studies", which Hall and his colleagues pioneered in the mid-1960 s. Professor Henry Louis Gates of Harvard University called him "Black Britain's leading theorist of black Britain. ". Hall saw Britain as a country which is forever battling, within itself and with other nations. "Britain is not homogenous; it was never a society without conflict, " he said. "The English fought tooth and nail over everything we know of as English political virtues – rule of law, free speech, the franchise. " He noted sardonically that "the very notion of Great Britain's 'greatness' is bound up with empire. Euroscepticism and Little Englander nationalism could hardly survive if people understood whose sugar flowed through English blood and rotted English teeth. " To sugar can also be added tobacco and cotton, as commodities which remain as a reminder of slave-trade Britain and its cultural legacy”.

STUART HALL (5) After his studies at Jamaica College he emigrated to Britain in 1951 on a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford University, part of the Windrush generation of immigrants. The memory of sitting at Paddington Station after his arrival, watching the crowds, remained with him, accompanied by the eternal questions: "Where on earth are these people going to? And where do they think they are going to? ". These questions and the quest for answers to them would characterise his life's work.

E. Said: biography (1) • • Edward Said, (born November 1, 1935, Jerusalem—died September 25, 2003, New York, U. S. ), Palestinian American academic, political activist, and literary critic who examined literature in light of social and cultural politics and was an outspoken proponent of the political rights of the Palestinian people and the creation of an independent Palestinian state. Said’s father, Wadie Ibrahim, was a wealthy businessman who had lived some time in the United States. In 1947 Wadie moved the family from Jerusalem to Cairo in order to avoid the conflict that was beginning over the United Nations partition of Palestine into separate Jewish and Arab areas (see Arab-Israeli wars. In Cairo, Said was educated in English-language schools before transferring to an exclusive school in the United States in 1951. He attended Princeton University and Harvard University where he specialized in English literature. He joined the faculty of Columbia University as a lecturer in English in 1963 and in 1967 was promoted to assistant professor of English and comparative literature.

Said, biography (2) • Said was promoted to full professor in 1969 and in 1978 published Orientalism, his best-known work and one of the most influential scholarly books of the 20 th century. In it Said examined Western scholarship of the “Orient, ” specifically of the Arab Islamic world (though he was an Arab Christian), and argued that early scholarship by Westerners in that region was biased and projected a false and stereotyped vision of “otherness” on the Islamic world that facilitated and supported Western colonial policy. • Said wrote numerous books and articles in his support of Arab causes and Palestinian rights. He was especially critical of U. S. and Israeli policy in the region, and this led him into numerous, often bitter, polemics with supporters of those two countries. He was elected to the Palestine National Council (the Palestinian legislature in exile) in 1977, and he supported a peaceful resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. His autobiography, Out of Place (1999), reflects the ambivalence he felt over living in both the Western and Eastern traditions. • In addition to his political and academic pursuits, Said was an accomplished musician and pianist. See: https: //www. youtube. com/watch? v=Yv. R 3 qero. Q 2 M

Edward Said • • • Orientalism (1978) The World, The Text and the Critic (1983) The Question of Palestine (1992) Culture and Imperialism (1993) Out of Place (1999) Humanism and Democratic Criticism (2004)

E. Said: the public intellectual • “Public intellectual” • Awareness of the problematic relationship between knowledge and power (see Gramsci, Foucault) • Crucial role of the intellectual

Orientalism (1978) • • Il critico mette a nudo le complicità della cultura occidentale (nella forma di scienza con pretese di obiettività) con il progetto imperiale volto al dominio di altre nazioni Conoscenza e potere (Foucault): ‘Knowledge’ about the ‘Orient’ as it was produced and circulated in Europe was an ideological accompaniment of colonial ‘power’. The book is not about non-Western cultures, but about the Western representation of these cultures (Orientalism as a discipline supported by others such as archeology, philosophy, history, literature etc. ). It investigates how the formal study of the ‘Orient’ contributed to the functioning of colonial power

Orientalism in literature • Said argues that representation of the ‘Orient’ in European literary texts, travelogues and other writings contributes to the creation of a dichotomy between Europe and its ‘others’. • ‘Knowledge’ is seen as a crucial part of maintaining power over the oppressed

“Orientalism” • The study of the Orient was not objective but “a political vision of reality whose structures promoted the difference between the familiar (Europe, the West, ‘us’) and the strange (the Orient, the East, ‘them’)” (Orientalism) • Dicothomy essential in the construction of European self-conception (civilization, progress, rationality, control, masculinity etc. )

The Question of Palestine (1979) • He explores the complex existential, historical reality lived by the ‘others’ through the eyes of the ‘others’. • History of Palestine and its people as lived and interpreted by them

Culture and Imperialism (1993) • • • “Overlapping territories, intertwined histories” It explores literary works (mostly novels) produced by Western writers about other worlds, works characterized by a prejudicial approach to the ‘others’ and by an Orientalist view. The novel as a literary genre plays a crucial role in creating imperialist attitudes and preconceptions. Said insists on the importance of narratives in shaping identities, both individual and collective ones. Homi Bhabha asserts that “Nations are narrations” (Nazioni e narrazioni, 1997). The literary texts taken into exam are seen as inextricably connected to the imperial system within which they were conceived.

Said, contrapuntual reading (From Culture and Imperialism) • Contrapuntal analysis is used in interpreting colonial texts, considering the perspectives of both the colonizer and the colonized. If one does not read with the right background, one may miss the implications of the presence of Antigua in Mansfield Park, Australia in Great Expectations, or India in Vanity Fair. Interpreting contrapuntally is interpreting different perspectives simultaneously and seeing how the text interacts with other related contexts. It is reading with "awareness both of the metropolitan history that is narrated and of those other histories against which (and together with which) the dominating discourse acts". Contrapuntal reading means reading a text "with an understanding of what is involved when an author shows, for instance, that a colonial sugar plantation is seen as important to the process of maintaining a particular style of life in England".

Said: New Humanism (from Humanism and Democratic Criticism, 2004) • • “What concerns me is humanism as a useable praxis for intellectuals and academics who want to know what they are doing, what they are committed to as scholars, and who want also to connect these principles to the world in which they live as citizens”. “Not to see that the essence of humanism is to understand human history as a continuous process of self -understanding and self-realization, not just for us, as white, male, European, and American, but for everyone, is to see nothing at all”. “Humanism is not a way of consolidating and reaffirming what ‘we’ have always known and felt, but rather a means of questioning, upsetting, and reformulating so much of what is presented to us as commodified, packaged, uncontroversial, and uncritically codified certainties, including those contained in the masterpieces herded under the rubric of ‘the classics”. “Humanism is the only – I would go so far as saying the final – resistance we have against the inhuman practices and injustices that disfigure hunan history” (Preface to Orientalism, 2003)

Said: Living in exile (from “The Mind of Winter”, 1987) • • “The Exile knows that in a secular and contingent world homes are always provisional. Borders and barriers, which enclose us within the safety of familiar territories, can also become prisons, and are often defended beyond reason or necessity. Exiles cross borders, break barriers of thought and experience”. “Seeing ‘the entire world as a foreign land’ makes possible originality of vision. Most people are principally aware of one culture, one setting, one home. Exiles are aware of at least two and this plurality of vision gives rise to an awareness of simultaneous dimensions, an awareness that is ‘contrapuntual’”.